'Cause Take-Two has that money, money, yeah-yeah!

Rockstar el Presidente Leslie Benzies revealed recently in an interview that the production budget spent to bring their blockbuster hit Grand Theft Auto IV ran around $100 million dollars, which marks it as the most costly development of any game to date. Meanwhile, Jack Thompson is probably out somewhere crying to anyone who will listen that it was funded by blood money, gained on the bodies of crippled orphans or something.

Anyway, the previous record-holder was SEGA's Shenmue for the Dreamcast, released in 2000 and costing a then-unprecedented $70 million to produce. Remember when people used to do this kind of stuff out of their garage? And now, "It's like making a theatre production, a few movies and an album all to fit into one package," Benzies told the Times Online.

Other facts and figures that went into Niko's Big Adventure include 1,000 people who pitched in on the development. Further, Rockstar went to the effort of setting up time-lapse cameras on NYC rooftops to catch Spider-man in the act catch the correct intensity of the rainfall, and took some 100,000 pictures on location to help create the city known as Liberty.

"We're constantly competing against ourselves," says Benzies. "If something isn't exactly right, it comes out of the game or gets fixed." Or gets turned into Hot-- well, we don't want to go there again, do we?